Gran Telescopio Canarias (Big Canarian Telescope) also known as GranTeCan or GTC was inaugurated on July 24th 2009. It’s the largest optical an infrared telescope in the world, with a segmented main mirror 10.4 m acros which gathers as much light as four million human eyes. The top of the dome is 41 m above the ground. GTC is owned 5% by the university of Mexico, 5% by the university…
Modern telescopes have mirrors made of a material called vitro ceramic, which keeps its size and shape in spite of changes in temperature, covered with a very thin layer of aluminium. Domestic mirrors have glass in front of the aluminium, to protect it, but that means that the light passes through the glass twice – coming and going – which degrades the image. So telescope mirrors have the aluminium…
GranTeCan is the biggest optical telescope in the world, and it’s hard to convey the sheer size of it in a photograph. The telescope itself weighs 485 tonnes. You could fit an tennis court inside the dome, and the top of the dome is 41 m above the ground. But you can’t see any of that in a photograph. Luckily for me, the engineers did some maintenance on the massive…
La Palma is home to one of the three most important astronomical observatories in the world. (The other two are Hawaii and the Atacama desert in Chile.) The observatory sits at the top of the island, at the Roque de los Muchachos. It’s a fascinating place to visit, but it’s not normally open to tourists – they’re too busy doing science. However, the IAC who run the site are organising…
Sometimes my life contains far too much laundry and cooking and mopping floors. And sometimes I get to be really jammy. Today I was jammy. I spent the morning being trained to guide visitors around the biggest and best telescope in the world, Grantecan. I used to work at the William Herschel Telescope, when that was the biggest in Europe, so I’m used to big telescopes, but Grantecan is something…
Oddly enough, nobody invited me to meet the king of Spain at the official inauguration of GranTeCan (Gran Telescopio Canario or Big Canarian Telescope) so I had to watch it on the TV. I learned something new. The main mirror is accurate to 15 nanometres (a nanometre is a millionth of a millimetre). So if you scaled up the mirror to 10,400 km (and the radius of the Earth is…